A memorial for the Jewish citizens of Kolobrzeg, Poland.

Photograph by Grzegorz W. Tężycki under Creative Commons Deed-Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This year is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp. January 27 has been commemorated as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day; in 2025, 50 survivors of the camp will be the guests of honor, and delegations from 56 countries and international organizations will be in attendance.

Having been born in Poland, I grew up with some knowledge of the Holocaust. Until I left for college, I lived just outside of the city of Kolobrzeg – “Kolberg” before 1945. (My region, Pomerania, was originally Polish, but was gradually lost, first to the Teutonic Order, then to Sweden, and finally Prussia. It only became Polish again after the Treaty of Yalta, when Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill decided to move the borders of Poland westward.) Given that the history curriculum I was taught never included the local history, I discovered the Jewish history of my town years after I left.

Of course, we were taught about Auschwitz, and the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising. But I grew up far from these places, and the generic history books were silent about German Jews who lived in my hometown prior to 1939. Instead, we learnt whispered histories of buildings: apparently my high school used to be a Hitlerjugend school, a school for the youth who were in the Nazi paramilitary brigades. The park by the beach used to be a Jewish cemetery, and I only learned about it when surviving tombstones were arranged as a memorial at the entrance to the park in 2000. In the sixteenth century, there was even a short-lived Jewish ghetto, before the Jewish citizens were expelled in 1510.

I remember a slogan often wheeled out during school assemblies commemorating Polish anniversaries, “Kolobrzeg Always Polish.” As a kid, I simply accepted the lie. It took me years to understand how the teaching of history can serve propaganda causes. By not including the local history in the curriculum, the education authorities conveniently avoided the thorny question of Germans who lived in Kolobrzeg for centuries and then – didn’t, but also erased the existence of Kolobrzeg’s Jews who were a small but notable community in the late 1930s. They thrived before the Nazis came to power: there was a Jewish women’s association, a Jewish literature club, and multiple Jewish medical spas that used natural springs of saltwater for various treatments.

It is a terrible shame that we, the Polish kids, were not taught the Jewish histories of the places we lived in. While it is absolutely vital to learn about the Holocaust, knowing about the flourishing of the Jews of Kolobrzeg and of thousands of other not-so-prominent places would make the loss of Central and Eastern European Jews more personal. The people murdered in the Holocaust and exiled would be seen as potential neighbors and friends. The Holocaust would be seen as a genocide that deprived us, those who remain, of meaningful relationships. (I do realize that this view may be viewed as simplistic; after all, Poles were all too often complicit in Jewish deaths, as neighbors handed over neighbors to the Nazis, or directly responsible when Poles murdered Jews in pogroms. However, this is my personal perspective. I am writing this to say that I feel deprived of all the Jewish connections I could never make.)   

All of us who lived in Kolobrzeg in the ’80s and ’90s were “from somewhere,” and families brought their histories with them. My knowledge of Polish Jews and the Holocaust outside of textbooks comes from my grandmother who passed away in May 2023.

Memory 1: My grandmother had Jewish neighbors and played with Jewish kids. Her mother hung out with Jewish women at her shop.

Memory 2: As a six-year-old, in 1939, my grandmother was forced by the Nazis to watch mass executions of Jews in the town square of Strzemieszyce, her hometown forty miles north of Auschwitz. She had nightmares about watching her neighbors being hanged until she died. I only found out about this after she was gone.

Memory 3: Her father was forced by the Nazis to fix electrical lines at the Auschwitz camp. When the sound of the incoming transport train was heard, he was told by the guards to climb the electrical pole next to the ramp (he was repairing the lights) and to hold on. If he somehow mixed in with the transport, he would perish with these people, he was told. He held on; afterwards, he spoke of a sea of people brutally kicked out of train cars by the Nazi guards and driven toward the camp. The organizational efficiency was shocking. It took all of a few minutes for them to disappear from view.

I’m writing this to say the shadow of the Holocaust, a genocide that happened in the middle of a supposedly civilized world, while that so-called civilized world refused to believe in the barbarism despite repeated reports and pleas, is never far for me, even though I was born forty years after it happened and its memorialization was neatly limited to official places with plaques. These memories are everywhere, it just takes a bit of unearthing.

I encourage you, reader, to read about Jewish lives and flourishing; read the magical novels by Isaac Bashevis Singer; Yaffa Eliach’s There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok; or Robert Liberles’ Jews Welcome Coffee. Read books by those who were murdered in the Holocaust, like Anne Frank; those who fought the Nazis, like Marek Edelman; and those who survived against all odds, like William Mishell. They must not be forgotten.

As an adult, I understand the importance of anniversaries better. UNESCO states on its website: “Remembering and learning about the Holocaust reveals the dangers of antisemitism, discrimination and dehumanization. UNESCO emphasizes the importance of understanding and addressing the legacies of violent pasts to help develop the knowledge and values to prevent future atrocity crimes.”

As heads of state and prominent officials gather at Auschwitz to mark the occasion, it is hard for me not to think about our collective failure to truly honor the victims of the Holocaust by preventing future genocide. “Never again” is a statement of hope, but it sounds hollow today. Have we learned anything from this tragedy? The staunch refusal to acknowledge the parallels between the Holocaust and the genocides that happened in its wake, as well as the inaction and impotence of the international community to stop genocide show that at this point in history, all we can afford to do is utter empty words. May the future generations do better.